Lisa Jardine - The Awful End of Prince William the Silent - The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Hand-Gun

William’s volunteer forces were no match for Alva and his Spanish army. In 1568 and again in 1570 his military incursions from his German territories were disastrous (Dutch historians refer to them as ‘débâcles’), not least because William could not raise the necessary finance from among his allies outside the Low Countries to pay his troops, and was increasingly hampered in his operations by threats of desertion and mutiny. On both occasions he was driven back by Alva, having only managed to secure a number of towns in Holland and Zeeland – the two north-western provinces which fronted the Netherlands coastline, providing control over sea-traffic in the North Sea (or, as the Dutch called it, the Narrow Sea). William’s success in obtaining control of Holland and Zeeland was, however, of enormous importance to England, since his domination of the coastline offered Protestant protection from the Spanish invasion the English feared constantly throughout this period. The English queen, Elizabeth I, though reluctant to be drawn into direct confrontation with Spain in the Netherlands, nevertheless provided a steady stream of soldiers and indirect financing for William the Silent’s Dutch Revolt, in her own interests.

A historical turning point for the Orange cause – though not military success – came in 1572. As so often in the story of the Dutch Revolt, the gains made by William the Silent (who on this occasion also was eventually forced to concede victory and withdraw) derived as much from political events outside the Netherlands as from the outcomes of specific battles and sieges within the provinces themselves. 10 In May 1572 the strategically important town of Mons on the French-Low Countries border went over to the Protestant cause. Mons had been heavily fortified by Charles V as a border stronghold at the time of his wars against France. Its almost impregnable walls were now defended by Count Louis of Nassau and a group of supporters of the Orange cause, with the help of a contingent of French Huguenots (a total of around 1,500 troops) and about a thousand local Protestant supporters. An independent provincial government was set up in the town and Calvinist worship made legal (contravening the explicit prohibitions of Philip II and his Inquisition).

The French king, Charles IX – vacillating between Catholic and Protestant causes in his own civil-war-torn country – was known to be considering an invasion of the Low Countries in support of the Protestant Huguenot cause, with the strategic political objective of confronting Spain in the arena of the Netherlands. Alerted to this, and faced with the possibility of a full-scale invasion across the French border, Alva pulled most of his troops back from the heart of the revolt in the northern provinces of Holland and Zeeland, and massed them in Brabant at Mons, besieging the city. This was a shrewd move, even though it allowed Holland and Zeeland to consolidate their advantage in the north-west.

In mid-June, just before Alva’s blockade of Mons became total, Count Louis sent a messenger out of the city to urge the French Huguenots to carry out their promise and mount a massive invasion of the Netherlands in the name of Charles IX. On the advice of his senior, Huguenot-sympathising military commander Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the French king acceded to the request. On 12 July Louis’ messenger, Jean de Hangest, lord of Genlis, left Paris with a force of around six thousand men. Five days later he marched straight into a Spanish ambush at St Ghislain, six miles south of Mons, and almost his entire force was destroyed either by the enemy troops or by the local peasants, for whom the French were still the traditional enemy. 11

Charles IX, who considered the rout of troops sent on his express orders towards Mons (and surely betrayed into an ambush by Spanish-sympathising intelligencers in Paris) a political embarrassment, hastily tried to distance himself from Coligny’s support of the Orangists. On 12 August he instructed his ambassador in the Netherlands to deny his involvement:

The papers found upon those captured with Genlis [show] … everything done by Genlis to have been committed with my consent … Nevertheless, [you will tell the Duke of Alva] these are lies invented to excite his suspicion against me. He must not attach any credence to them … You will also tell them what you know about the enemy’s affairs from time to time, by way of information, in order to please him and to make him more disposed to believe in your integrity. 12

To the French Catholic party, led by the Duke of Guise and backed by Charles IX’s mother Catherine de Medici, Gaspard de Coligny was directly responsible for the French humiliation at Mons. As the instigator of the continuing attempts to persuade the king to declare war on Spain on behalf of the Huguenots, and to engage with Alva’s forces in the Low Countries, he became the focus for the Guise party’s violent animosity. In August 1572, King Charles finally gave Coligny royal authorisation to invade the Netherlands. On the morning of 22 August there was a Guise-backed attempted assassination of Coligny, which failed when a musket-shot fired by Maurevel succeeded only in wounding the Admiral in the arm. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which began on the night of 23 August, was a consequence of this failed assassination attempt. According to the papal envoy in Paris, reporting to the Vatican: ‘If the Admiral had died from the shot, no others would have been killed.’ 13 The opening move in the massacre was a second attempt on Coligny’s life. Having this time succeeded in stabbing him to death on his sickbed, Catholic supporters of the Guise faction went on to murder an estimated two thousand residents of Paris, including all the leading members of the Huguenot party and a number of notable Protestant intellectuals and public figures. The massacre continued in the French provinces well into October, and put paid once and for all to hopes of a major Huguenot force coming to the aid of the Protestant cause in the Low Countries.

William of Orange invaded the Duchy of Brabant from Germany on 27 August with a troop of twenty thousand men, still expecting to rendezvous with the promised French Huguenot army led by Coligny. News of Coligny’s assassination and the ensuing mass slaughter of Huguenots only reached him at Mechelen. It was a ‘stunning blow’, William wrote to his brother Count John of Nassau, since ‘my only hope lay with France’. Had it not been for the massacre, the combined Protestant forces would, William believed, have succeeded in relieving Mons and gaining the psychological upper hand in the conflict: ‘we would have had the better of the Duke of Alva and we would have been able to dictate terms to him at our pleasure’. On 24 September, having failed to break Alva’s grip on Mons, William told his brother that he had decided to fall back on Holland or Zeeland, ‘there to await the Lord’s pleasure’. A few weeks later he spoke gloomily of making his ‘sépultre’ (grave) in Holland. 14 In fact he consolidated the rebel positions there, creating a reasonably secure base for the Orangist forces; he was right, though, in believing that he never would achieve the union of the north-western and south-eastern provinces in a single, Protestant state under his or any other leadership.

In spite of his own profound pessimism, and although history treats his first three campaigns as failed military operations, this was the moment when William the Silent began to be hailed within the Low Countries as the country’s hero and potential saviour. The creation in letters, pamphlets and speeches of a potent and lasting image of William the Silent as a man of heroic integrity, fighting selflessly on behalf of freedom for the Fatherland, was the achievement of a group of distinguished intellectuals who formed part of William’s immediate entourage. These included Philips Marnix van St Aldegonde, who acted first as the prince’s secretary and later as his trusted confidential emissary, Loyseleur de Villiers, who became his court chaplain and close adviser in 1577, and the Huguenot intellectuals Hubert Languet and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, who joined the prince’s household in Antwerp around 1578. 15